Making Catholic America:Religious Nationalism ​in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Catholic Prelates at the Columbian Catholic Congress. From Progress of the Catholic Church in America and the Great Columbian Catholic Congress of 1893, Vol. II: World’s Columbian Catholic Congresses, 6th ed. (Chicago: J.S. Hyland and Company, 1897).

Making Catholic America describes how Catholics worked in the years following the Civil War to entrench their claim to belonging in the consolidating American nation. They did so by demonstrating the integral roles they and their coreligionists played in a variety of connected imperial, political, and public reform projects and by engaging in a rhetoric of anti-Protestantism against the Protestants who frequently regarded themselves as the model Americans. Sitting at the intersection of a number of historical subfields, including religious, social, political, and intellectual history, Making Catholic America will be useful for readers seeking to understand not only Catholic intellectual trends but also larger questions of nationalism, identity, and public power in the postbellum United States.​

The post-Reconstruction era was a period of immense cultural, economic, political, and social change. It was also a time of significant transformations in the country’s religious life, a development that has been frequently neglected in broader studies of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The period between the Civil War and the Great Depression serves as relatively untilled ground awaiting a thorough examination of the ways Catholics, whose church became the country’s largest by 1890, perceived their own places in the American nation.

The subjects that make up this manuscript’s narrative core – western expansion and U.S. Indian policy; turn-of-the-twentieth-century world’s fairs; extraterritorial imperialism; immigration reform, regulation, and restriction; and judicial and political battles over the public role of religion in the Progressive Era – served as essential components of the postbellum nation building project for both Catholics and Protestants alike. They functioned as the nexus in which Catholicism, Protestantism, and the state vied for influence and power in defining the physical extent, ideological character, and demographic composition of the nation. Underlying them all was an ever-present critique on the part of Americanist Catholics which held that the nation was far more dynamic an entity than was described by the Protestants of their imaginations. This critique also argued that Catholics should play an integral role in spreading Christian civilization across the American frontier, extending it beyond the western hemisphere, and then advancing the civilizing project within their own ranks in an attempt to prove to non-Catholics that Catholicism was a quintessentially American community worthy of taking its place alongside Protestantism in the administration of the country’s civil religion.